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15 Jul 2025, by Amy Sarcevic
With $16.2 billion worth of infrastructure, 3036 major projects, and a freight task consisting of 891,000 annual trips, Transport NSW knows the stakes of its crisis and emergency management are high.
If handled inappropriately, even minor setbacks could incur the agency – and broader community – significant costs, with each hour of operational downtime costing millions.
However, with a workforce of 30,000, and a complex organisational structure, coordinating a response to emergencies is no small task, explains Executive Director Karen McCarthy.
“Our diversity of function and statewide coverage means that we can be a complex organisation to manoeuvre. We have to think creatively about how we can respond to the full repertoire of threats,” she told Informa Connect.
So how does the agency ensure it can pivot quickly, in response to setbacks like adverse weather?
Ahead of the Rail Decarbonisation and Resilience Conference, we spoke with Ms McCarthy to find out.
Governance arrangements
With its Secretary overseeing 15 direct reports, Transport NSW knows strong governance arrangements are essential.
To ensure its entire structure is crisis ready, the agency has established three organisational levels.
“We have a tactical level, an operational level and a strategic level – each with distinct roles and responsibilities,” Ms McCarthy said.
“Each of the 15 – soon to be 16 – direct reports to the Secretary has its own incident management arrangements.
“Then, depending on what type of challenge they are dealing with, they report to an incident management team, at the enterprise level.”
Ms McCarthy, who chairs this incident management team, then reports to an executive crisis management team.
“This includes the Secretaries, deputies, and CEOs of each division. It’s that final layer of command before signing off on an urgent intervention,” she said.
Leaning on data
As an organisation that operates in crowded places with lots of transport interchanges, maintaining situational awareness is important.
For this reason, the agency has also set up an emergency and crisis coordination hub.
“This is a strategic approach, which uses more than 600 data sets – around 250 of which are in real time.
“We continuously monitor this data, so that we can be respond instantly to any hazard or crisis – whether it’s a natural hazard, a cyberattack, a bio security type threat, or counterterrorism.
“The data allows us to identify threats, monitor and obtain relevant information, then predict what impacts might be so we can deliver strategic advice and mature beyond situational awareness. It also shows us where to embed greater resilience for non-immediate threats.”
Interventions
To ensure interventions are enacted quickly and impact is minimised, Transport NSW has various strategies up its sleeve.
“We continually strengthen our multimodal approach, so that when we have disruption in one transport modality, we can accommodate people elsewhere.
“Here, we use data to helps understand customer behaviour and how people might shift from the rail mode to continue their journey on another modality. We then have contingency plans to ensure we can handle that movement.”
In a similar vein, Transport NSW uses data to model flood events and how they might impact network assets.
“We’ve got some mature predictive capabilities, which help respond to information from the SES and the Bureau of Meteorology.
“This means we can provide risk profiles to asset owners and make arrangements to mitigate damage.”
AI and automation
Making use of CCTV across the network, Transport NSW also leverages AI to develop risk profiles for adverse weather events.
“When water is on the road, the technology can verify – with reasonable confidence – whether it is a puddle, blocked drain or the start of a flooding event.
“This helps us develop a risk profile and means we don’t need people physically going out to locations to see where water is.”
Similarly, AI is helping the agency develop a climate change dashboard, which assess the risk of climate change scenarios against its asset base.
“It helps us understand the resilience our assets have under each scenario and where we might need future investment to make these locations more resilient to water and temperature.”
Further insight
Sharing more on Transport NSW’s crisis and emergency management approach, Karen McCarthy will present at the upcoming Rail Decarbonisation and Resilience Conference, held 22-23 July 2025.
This year’s event will explore how industry is using sustainable infrastructure and technology to handle future threats, with a focus on climate-adaptive design, cyber resilience, and emergency response. Solutions like clean traction power, alternate fuels, and energy-efficient operations will also be discussed.
Learn more and register your tickets here.
About Karen McCarthy
Karen is the Executive Director for Enterprise Security, Crisis and Emergency Management at Transport for NSW, where she is responsible for the delivery of state emergency management arrangements.
Karen has had a decorated career in the NSW Police, having been awarded the National Medal, National Police Service Medal, NSW Police Force Medal and receiving a Churchill Fellowship in 2013.
She has also been recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, receiving the Australian Police Medal for her 31-year career as an officer and her tireless work in the community.
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